


Taking Over

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Gen, Masturbation, Unrequited Crush, Unrequited Lust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-17
Updated: 2015-01-17
Packaged: 2018-03-07 21:15:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3183440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Told from Bro's POV as he starts crushing hard on his brother's best friend.</p><p>Really nothing more to it than that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Taking Over

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Grubtier](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Grubtier).



> Note that it might be a bit confusing to read through at first. There's not much indication of time, but everything at the beginning is something of a flashback. About halfway through is where it sort of just shifts into the present, so keep an eye out.

No one ever warned you about this. No one has ever once sat you down, held onto your forearm, and told you how much this feeling was a fucking nightmare and a blessing all at once. Didn’t tell you you would wake up thinking about them, about what they were thinking about, about their opinion of you, about how much it hurt to physically restrain yourself from taking their face into your hands while they were in the middle of talking and just kiss them stupid, over and over and over--

You’re not sure how to feel about that.

There were plenty of times you had wished you would find something like this. You’re not one to lie to yourself. Even as the “lone wolf” type you claimed and pushed yourself to be, you’ve had your moments. Granted, they usually only came about in the middle of the night when you were staring at the alarm clock on your desk across the living room and desperately wanting sleep (and possibly someone to help you achieve that) and your thoughts wandered. Wandered to what could have been, what you could have been, but the thoughts either upset you or make you too hopeful so you abandon them.

But then they started happening in the daytime. Specifically, the times of the day that he would visit.

At first, you treated him like any other friend of your brother’s-- a little shit who had better follow the bullshit rules you came up with on the spot (they changed every time; one girl had been forbidden from using your toaster). You hadn’t thought much of the guy at first. Sure, he was cute, with tanned skin that made those gorgeous blue eyes stand out even more behind those dorky glasses, framed by cowlicked black hair. A few pranks and silly comments later had you deciding that his cheeks were much, much better when dusted in shades of pink.

Within days of knowing him you had decided you would try your best to get into his pants (well, shorts, as those were the norm for him).

You were fine whenever he turned you down by explaining he was straight. Oh well. There would be plenty of conquests after him to come (ha). Plenty of other cute college boys with a little too much front teeth that only accentuated his smile more.

What you hadn’t taken into account was that he would turn out to be much, much more than you ever could have hoped for.

After your denied proposal of an hour or two of shimmying on top of sheets, he was a bit more hesitant to touch you, but for the most part the friendship that had formed between you had remained the same. Also fine. You were friends with your regular fuckbuddies, you weren’t really going to feel weird about it.

And then the feelings nation attacked.

Looking back, and considering your track record, it was pretty much inevitable that this would happen. For all your downright fucking weird quirks, your smuppet traps, your openness about your fluid sexuality, he never insulted you or seemed to be very disgusted with you. Sure, you both picked on each other and pulled a few nasty pranks, some of which involved dye in your shampoo and his overnight bag void of clothes and instead filled with ice cubes, or sometimes he would comment on how “fucking lame” or “dorky” you and your clothing choices were. But it was never anything heartfelt, nor anything offensive. He was just making fun with you instead of _of_ you, and you appreciated that. It was a nice change.

He was also the only one Dave had never managed to convince to break the rules. Oh, not to say he didn’t, just to gauge your reaction and see how far was too far before he stepped over the lines he was constantly toeing at. He was the only one of Dave’s friends that had ever visited that had never been intimidated by you, no matter what effort you put out to get him to. And that was infuriating for reasons you didn’t care to expand on.

No matter what, actually, he seemed to be able to laugh anything off before biting back with his own remark. You were pretty much certain that nothing was able to phase him, so instead of continuously pushing at his buttons and trying to get a reaction, you just gave up.

He noticed. You could tell that much. Your theory that nothing was able to phase this fucking kid still held out, because he only seemed to treat you better than before just as you were to him, and yeah, you guess it was possible he lived by the golden rule.

It didn’t take long after you two started behaving more like actual friends than rivals in prankhood for you to start noticing the little things. The details.

How, when he accidentally messed up something of yours while trying to get at Dave, he would stand in front of you (just at eye level, too) and fidget, hands behind his back and wringing his shirt while he put on a sheepish expression, lower lip caught between his teeth as he was stuck somewhere between bursting out laughing and being nervous about how you might react.

Even if you were pissed, he just gave you this perfect, fucking _perfect_ puppy expression, and you could tell he was the type of kid who had grown up with a lenient father who probably fell to his knees from how wobbly they got from that look. John was spoiled and you weren’t sure whether you hated or loved him for it, or how you felt about always giving into it.

When he’d had a stressful day at school (he attended the same public college as your brother, which focused on visual, performing, and musical arts) he would get this slight slouch to his posture, and every time you saw it you just wanted to massage his problems away, get him sitting up straight again and bring back that full bucktoothed smile that you’d grown to love.

That particular train of thought never ended well. Massages meant noises, and noises meant thoughts wandering towards not-safe-for-work places, John showing you how much he appreciated the massages--

Yeah. Yeah, you were going to stop that right there. That would be taken up again later in the night, as they often had begun to, with your teeth gnawing into your fist to keep yourself quiet as the other hand busied itself downstairs, always torturously slowly; your eyes squeezed shut as you imagined it was him, him being the one to torture you, your sanity left up to his strokes, his laugh quiet and smile predatory against your ear, making you beg and make a mantra of his name until he’d gotten all he could from you and finally let you come.

You were still working on making yourself last in the real world during the whole simulation running through your head.

So much for stopping yourself from thinking about it.

At least you know yourself well enough to admit that you’re a weak man.

A weak man who, for all your intents and purposes, still found yourself staring after John whenever he mumbled “morning” to you after yet another sleepover, just the slightest hint of stubble dotting his jawline, hair messy from sleep and eyes a little unfocused as he headed for the kitchen. He was never surprised after the first few nights about your odd sleeping habits (or lack thereof), and after months of regular visiting, had simply given up caring about pyjamas. Honestly, the switch from a hooded onesie to shirtless in these ridiculous Ghostbusters boxers sent both you and your little man confused signals. On one hand, the onesie had only helped you notice how adorable (for lack of a better word) he actually was, but on the other, it was pretty impolite to talk to someone with a half-chub going on just because of how you were just now noticing that they were fit underneath those unflattering clothes.

The dom-John in your thoughts at night now had a new outfit to sport, though every now and again you were haunted by realizing just how ridiculous it would be if he palmed himself under them. That little fucking slime at the front of those boxers almost seemed like it was laughing at you, with the way John’s hand moved underneath, teasing you in the least sexy way possible.

This was your masturbation material, dammit. Ghosty slimes weren’t allowed to threaten you this way.

Considering that that was a thought you legitimately just had, you can’t really blame it for laughing at you.

It takes a few weeks after you’ve started taking notice of John for Dave to take notice of you doing just that.

There’s no verbal comment, but you know when you turn away from the open kitchen where John’s fixing himself a sandwich (did he buy groceries? Since when did you own bread?) that your brother coming back from the bathroom caught you red-handed just by the quirk of his eyebrows. You’re not sure whether he’s pissed, annoyed, or just done with your shit, but he continues not saying anything once his friend leaves for the day. He just slinks back to his room and shuts the door, leaving you to yourself.

There’s only a confrontation later, now, during yet another sleepover (you figure by this point, a whole damn year since he first started coming here, John can have the news broken to him that the rules he’d been following and breaking religiously never existed in the first place) which finds a sleep-deprived John sitting next to you on the futon and rambling on about whatever was going through his mind at four in the morning, and you…

Well. You nearly do it. You were so close to leaning over, having been distracted by those lips moving constantly for the past five minutes, and planting one right on that fucker. You’d even managed a few nervous inches towards him, and in his dazed stupor, hadn’t noticed, laughing about something and tilting his head back towards the ceiling. With his neck exposed like that, you were distracted in an entirely different way, wanting to get your mouth over the prominent Adam’s apple, feel the vibrations from his throat as he moaned, hold him close as he shivered and whispered your name like it was the only thing keeping him grounded. You were this close, this close to glory, and then you glance behind John for only a brief second, sucking your lower lip into your mouth to wet it, and staring back at you?

Dave.

God knows what this had looked like from his point of view.

You barely had time to jerk back from the boy who takes your breath away before your brother was standing in front of where you were seated, arms folded and sending a pointed look John’s way.

“Get back to bed, Egbert. Me ‘n Bro have got some shit to resolve. Yes, right now. Don’t look at me like that. Go.”

You are so fucked.

\-----

He spends the next hour whisper-yelling at you, barely letting you get a word in edgewise even whenever he asks you a question. Rhetorical, you guess.

He demands to know what you thought you were doing, you know John is straight right, that’s my best friend dude, was he just going to be yet another one of your infamous conquests cause if so I got a bone to pick with you, blah blah blah.

You decide in the end it’s best to let him tucker himself out of any insults or paranoid thoughts he’s having. Let him finish his vomit of verbiage and shut up so you can get in your two cents, and when you do, he’s just kind of left there. Stunned. You can tell that, of the many, many things that passed through his head in the past twenty seconds, among them was a “you have feelings? for an actual person?” and yeah, you have to admit you’re kind of stunned by that, too. In the romantic sense, in any case.

He doesn’t make you divulge every little detail of your infatuation, thank god. It’s too weird for either of you to even begin talking about besides stating the simple fact that it exists, so he leaves you alone after you promise to never make a move on John without consent.

He has a point. You’re almost glad he stopped you before you could fuck everything up with just one kiss, which honestly, is probably what would have happened.

That night you manage to not think of those long pianist's fingers touching you, though when you wake up it feels as if you didn't sleep at all.

Another month goes by. A birthday comes, John's, and he seems to nearly piss himself whenever he unwraps your gift (lovingly done up in custom-made Nicolas Cage paper, which he takes care to not tear) to find a giant box set of movies he probably already owns-- every single Cage and McConaughey movie stuffed into a single, gilded collection, with each flick (even the ones that barely made it to shelves) in Deluxe or Director's Cut editions, joined by, what else, two signatures on the side of the box. What can you say? You had strings you could pull to make it happen. Very complicated, woven strings.

Probably. A magician never reveals his secrets.

You also made John a smuppet-print magician hat.

You get the complete Egbert package all at once: a grin, a roll of those beautiful blue eyes, and a punch to the shoulder, and you probably feel the center of your chest melt a little. Fuck if just your heart is appreciating this, all of you seems to become mush whenever he’s around anymore. Either John is completely oblivious or Dave just knows you too well, but when you glance at your brother you just see a look that says he knows exactly what you’re feeling about this right now. Or maybe that was about the gift. You’re not exactly sure.

That evening, your bro heads to bed early, deciding he was too tired for this shit after getting fuckall hours of sleep for the past two days from blatantly refusing to rest his head for awhile. It worked out for you, because it meant spending time with John, and spending time with John meant being in a stellar mood for the rest of the day.

But you’re a weak man.

You’re going to take advantage of the leftover euphoria and increased opinion of you from your gift-- the more important one, of course-- and you’re going to do it.

You’re gonna climb this mountain. Drop those balls. Tell him how badly you’ve got the dokis for him.

You’re both back on the futon, the usual hangout spot for all three of you in this apartment, and just finished with a game of Smash that you let John win, even knowing full well he would gloat about it (he did). You make a comment about your controller just being broken, and it doesn’t take much after that before you’re both bickering and laughing at each other. 

He calms down, eventually, his arms resting over his stomach where just a few moments ago he’d been clutching for dear life, his body slouched from sliding down, shirt just barely ridden up in the back. Your heart ends up helpfully blocking your throat. It isn’t just a physical attraction, you know that by now. Have known for months. It helps that he’s the cutest fucking thing you’ve ever seen, but honestly, there’s more to him than that. You’re not even sure you have any substantial complaints about him or his habits (as much as him walking around shirtless has driven you absolutely nuts) and, considering how often he’s been over, you’d say you have a pretty damn good impression of that.

There are a few minutes of quiet between you both. You take advantage of it, using your time wisely to phrase what you want to say exactly how you want to say it, and you open your mouth to talk--

“You know what, Bro? You’re not nearly as lame as I used to think you were. I bet if you were a girl, I’d totally be into you, haha!”

Oh.

...Oh.

Oh. Okay.

Your initial response is to laugh, weak and flat but you guess that’s enough of a cover up for him to not be suspicious. Somehow.

You kind of just want to shrivel up and bury yourself into a hole in the ground and never come back up.

Never, in all of your years, had you imagined your first almost-confession going like this.

You had been one to break many hearts. You knew that. People never really seemed to get that when you hit on them, you were by no means only looking for sex. They never really seemed to get the concept of a one-night stand, especially those who were less experienced than you, and you tended to find a crumpled note or a new number in your phone all of a sudden listed under an unfamiliar name. Even one of your friends with benefits had trouble coping with the fact you weren’t going after a relationship with them.

Never, not once, have you ever expected to be the one to end up with the broken heart because they just weren’t that into you.

You feel ridiculous.

John bids you goodnight, and you don’t move from your spot.

That fuzzy feeling you’d grown accustomed to in his presence has completely vanished, and, well, if you’re being honest with yourself, you just feel kind of empty. Whatever you were feeling before that phrase was snuffed out completely.

Your one and only love interest in your life, and he turns out to be completely straight. Not even the subtle hints you’ve dropped in the past or nice things you’ve tried doing for him have made him stop and think about you as a romantic interest, and it doesn’t seem like he’ll be changing his mind, either. He’s had too much time to get to know you to write you off easily (god, just listen to you).

What a fucking turn of events.

You briefly consider going after him to confess anyway.

You fall the fuck asleep instead.


End file.
